My own theory is that we are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.
There’s a new generation of entrepreneurs in the Valley who have arrived since 2000, after the dotcom bust. They’re completely fearless.
There are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.
Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed.
The smartphone revolution is under-hyped, more people have access to phones than access to running water. We’ve never had anything like this before since the beginning of the planet.
Health care and education, in my view, are next up for fundamental software-based transformation.
We have never lived in a time with the opportunity to put a computer in the pocket of 5 billion people.
In the startup world, you’re either a genius or an idiot. You’re never just an ordinary guy trying to get through the day.
A lot of things you want to do as part of daily life can now be done over the Internet.
Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.
Software is eating the world.
My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.
The 2 hardest things you’ll have to do when running a company are recruiting and talking people out of leaving.
Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use – not only text or media but processing power too – will be located remotely.
People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do.
Over two billion people now use the broadband Internet, up from perhaps 50 million a decade ago, when I was at Netscape, the company I co-founded.
Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.
I love what the Valley does. I love company building. I love startups. I love technology companies. I love new technology. I love this process of invention. Being able to participate in that as a founder and a product creator, or as an investor or a board member, I just find that hugely satisfying.